What Happened:

MySpace yesterday announced the installation of a CFO, Mark Rosenbaum, who will report directly to the CEO. This comes at a time in the companies history where it is increasingly seen as an also-ran behind the break away success that Facebook has had in recent times. MySpace in June ousted their CEO, right after announcing a massive layoff-scheme that pared the companies workforce down. The company continues to struggle to find a new niche in the social marketing landscape.

What This Means:

MySpace is moving in a brand new direction. Smaller team, MySpace music, new CEO and CFO, and perhaps, a new monetization plan. Given the massive changes that the company has endured in the last year, it seems that the giant has little interest attacking Facebook on Facebook’s turn. Instead, with the launch of MySpace Music, the company seems to be attempting to braoden its one main competitive advantage: musicians.

However, given the reports that MySpace Music is hemorrhajing cash, it seems that that will not quickly replace revenues lost from its war with Facebook.

What We Think:

It is time for MySpace to stop being the last call for the remnant ad network and put its advertising house in order. The …

What Happened:

Vonage, the popular VoiP company, founded in 2006, is releasing an iPhone application today. This both further illuminates  the Google Voice fiasco, and brings extended Voip power to the iPhone, especially where wifi networks are present. The application allows users to place inexpensive calls over their wifi networks, or the voice network was approved by Apple without a hitch. The NYTimes reports that the Vonage senior vice president of products as saying:

“Mr. Tempora said he didn’t see any reason why Vonage’s application for the iPhone would not have been given a green light. “We built the application in complete accordance with Apple’s rules,” he said.”

This of course brings into question exactly which part of Google Voice Apple has the greatest beef with. Apple and ATT have a ban on using the ATT data network for sending voice network. Perhaps this is where GV made a specific misstep. It does sound unlikely, howere, that Google would miss something so obvious. Whatever happens, this will surely not hurt a flagging Vonage with a weak stock price and 1,500 employees that need to be kept …

DST, owners of a few percentage points of Facebook are snapping up more shares. If you own any bit of Facebook, the Russian DST wants to give you $14.77 a share for your part. DST has already put $300 million dollars into the social networking giant, but is hungry for even more. Given the current high price of Facebook, $300 million does not go very far. DST has turned to ex-employees and any other individual that may have any shares of Facebook  and asking them if they are open for purchase.

DST has a long view on Facebook, given that Zuckerberg still claims that an IPO is several years distant. Either DST will angle for one of the giants to purchase Facebook or indeed it is putting down some very patient bets. Given the size of the purchases, DST must have long faith in the possible longevity of Facebook, that indeed it will not become a flash in the pan fad that happens so often on the internet. Facebook is not speaking about the current DST moves, but now that DST is such a large and important Facebook investor, it seem unlikely that they will publicly decry …

FiveRuns, a startup that had raised nine million dollars from Austin Ventures, by WorkThink. FiveRuns was a provider service products around Ruby on Rails. Major products include TuneUp and Dash. WorkThink, according to my looking and TweetCrunch, WorkThink has yet to launch. Their website claims that they are working on getting to launch.

Odd that FiveRuns was acquired by a company that has yet to launch.

We do not have details on the terms of the deal at the moment, but when we do, we will update this post with more. It is always nice to see M/A movement in the market, especially after the announcement of yesterdays NewEgg IPO. Things are moving again folks, get ready.

There is nothing so fun, as a piece of acerbic, almost bitterly vitriolic, satire from one company to another. 37Signals, long a profitable company, and makers of the ever popular BaseCamp SAAS suite, has unleashed a note proclaiming their new valuation at 100,000,000,000 after two VC firms have pooled resources to purchase 0.000000001% of 37Signals, for a total investment of one dollar, or one hundred cents, one thousand tenths of cents, or even, if you dare, ten thousand hundredths of cents. No matter how you look at it, this is quite a bold investment.

Courtesy: tech.cygea.com/

The Story

There’s some new analysis out from Bernstein Research today which says that Apple is making a pretty good amount of money from the App Store. The applications market for the iPhone is estimated, based on this research, to be worth around $1 billion. Going further, Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein believes Apple makes between $60 million to $110 million per quarter from the app store, which means somewhere between $240 million and $440 million per year.

These numbers come from some estimated data. Mr. Sacconaghi’s range of revenue comes from the guess (though presumably an informed one) that 13% to 21% of all downloaded applications are paid, and that the average price of applications is $3.

Good Math?

The reason I bring up this study is because centralized locations for mobile applications are a great money maker for the platform developers. It doesn’t matter if you’re Microsoft, Google, or Apple – it’s nice to make money simply by providing a portal to other peoples’ work. But these new numbers conflict pretty severely with some old data.

Towards the end of last month, some data came to light from the …

80Legs, a new service that is launching today at Demo09, the older counterpoint to the TechCrunch50, is out to make web-crawling both cheaper and more accesible to companies. It has long been possible to build a web crawler for personal use, but the cost was always prohibitive. Who wants to build  a datacenter to merely do custom web crawling?

80Legs, funded with 400,000 in VC money from Creesis Ventures, is a SAAS web crawling solution that charges you a flat rate per million webpages crawled, and a CPU/rate to access the spidered information. All told, they just want $2 per million pages, which even the smallest company could afford. Now compare that with the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to set up a custom data center for company.

Past its basic offering, 80Legs is offering up an application store, to allow third party developers to create the tools and plugins to filter the search results effectively. This is the brilliant move that the company is making. Instead of trying to plug ten holes with one hand, the company is attempting take over the specific custom web crawling niche, and …

What Happened:

Skype will tomorrow, or in the near future, will be rolling out its Skype for SIP product. The product garnered a fair amount of criticism at launch, but Skype has pushed the product through to completion. Skype for SIP is a product that points towards a new push by Skype to push forward deeper into the corporate world. Skype is also working on building out its video calling feature to support corporate needs.

What This Means:

Where is the money? The consumer end user does not have it, and even if they did would not be willing to part with it. The money is in the corporations that have a communications problem, and Skype is going to attack those areas of opportunity. Although Skype is moving in this direction, do not worry that Skype will lose its edge in the consumer market, quite the contrary. If this new move by Skype can be interpreted, it would seem that Skype is positioning to become the first real new age telephony system since the rise of cell phones. First we had landlines, then we had cellphones, and now perhaps we are seeing the dawning of the …

What Is Google Up To: Google has just implemented today a new feature to the Google toolbar, which has an install base in the millions, called SideWiki to allow users of the toolbar too comment universally across websites and independently from the publisher who owns the content being commented on. Kutano, Glue, DotSpots, and other are working in a somewhat similar space, but none have 1% of the reach that Google can bring to the table over night.

The product works as an expandable sidebar that will be included in all upcoming downloads of the Google toolbar. You can download the toolbar here if you want to jump the gun. Google has now immediate plans to monetize the service.

What This Means: Well, several startups just took a few shots of vodka to get through the day. Given that there are any number of startups working in commenting on websites, and another batch working on commenting off websites, having Google come storming into their space is anything but welcome. Even more so, what an odd move by Google. It seems that …

AmieStreet, long one of the most innovative music startups online, has just announced their first major label partner. The label, Sony, will work with them, selling music in their demand-priced music marketplace. Sadly, Sony will not be following the AmieStreet model exactly, and will instead be pricing their music at three tiered levels: $.69, $.99, and $1.29. That final price feels steep, but the market will talk.

Whatever the method, motive, or effect, it is very gratifying to see a scrappy startup such as AmieStreet finally catch the eye of a major label. Never forget that both sides of the coin here are hurting. AmieStreet needs to expand its library to grow, and the majors are in a desperate spiral of declining revenues. Working together seem more than symbiotic, it feels vital.

AmieStreet has long employed a model where songs are priced based on demand, so that songs of little popularity cost less, and hits would quickly rise to a near one dollar price. It is a fair and simple way to sell music, and they have so far found success with it. However, the titan iTunes has long clung to …